EASE

Examination of Anomalous Self-Experience

Research group

Josef Parnas

Lennart Jansson

Julie Nordgaard

Mads Gram Henriksen

The aim of Mads Gram Henriksens individual postdoc project, “What is Psychosis?”, is to revise and define the concepts of psychosis, delusion, and hallucination from a clinical-phenomenological perspective. Given that psychosis is an etiologically heterogeneous condition, it remains questionable if psychosis really is a unitary phenomenon across the diagnostic categories. This project brackets the question of universality and focuses on schizophrenia. Since schizophrenia is a non-organic, not substance-induced, and non-affective mental disorder, it allows psychosis, delusions, and hallucinations to manifest themselves as lucidly as possible. The project draws on three main sources of information: 1) philosophical and phenomenological literature; 2) literature from the early German psychopathological tradition; and 3) qualitative-empirical data from in-depth interviews with patients with schizophrenia.

Annick Urfer Parnas

Peter Handest

Rasmus Revsbech

The main core of Rasmus Revsbech’s research is about rationality and social cognition in schizophrenia. It questions the validity of common presumptions about schizophrenic symptomatology and how they affect common research assumptions of irrationality and social deficits in schizophrenia. The research critically questions such common assumptions as well as the research born from them. Thus the goal is to empirically nuance the disease’s profound cognitive dimension, to some extent help rehumanise schizophrenia, and criticise some of the research conducted in the field. A future dimension is further evaluation and development of tests sensitive to the disturbed we.

The aim of Maja Zandersen’s PhD-project is to examine anomalous self-experiences in three different diagnostic groups of patients: borderline personality disorder, anorexia nervosa, and survival after torture.
The intention is to explore if and how anomalous self-experiences in these groups differ from self-disorders found in schizophrenia. Drawing upon phenomenology and its notion of different levels or dimensions of self-experience, the project aims at providing an empirical basis for conceptualizing different kinds of disturbances of the self with respect to these dimensions.
The PhD project is part of a larger research project, “Self-understanding and Self-alienation: Existential Hermeneutics and Psychopathology”, funded by the Velux Foundation.